Composition

I really, really need to work on composition, and remind myself to get close to the subject and not try to take in too much at once.

The other day I went to Apollo... I hadn't been there for a while, and it's a gorgeous sim that's been around at least as long as I've been in SL. I especially like it by night by the torchlit columns, walkways, and stairs, and one of the glowing, particle-emitting... well, if they weren't glowing and particle-emitting, I'd think they are birdbaths... that invite you to donate in support of Apollo (which I do, and I hope you will as well) caught my eye, and I took a picture:


I converted to JPEG and uploaded it to flickr, and it was OK, but... it was kind of all over the place (as opposed to stuck in the middle with you, I guess... sorry), so I tried cropping, with this result:


Better (although I fear that displays a bit of narcissism), but then I read "How to crop a photo for better composition" over at Photodoto, and the advice of not putting the subject dead center (perhaps related to the Rule of Thirds?), and ended up with:


which I think bears out the advice, so I will strive to compose better in the future.

Spindly? Not at all...

It's strange. In SL, one's shape is trivially (at least in comparison with RL!) tweakable. One's appearance is more like an outfit than one's self.

I know that. But I don't act that way. Concern about appearance follows me into SL, and so I felt oddly reassured by this article from chinaSMACK:

Recently, a beautiful girl with beautiful legs from Beijing Sport University has exploded with popularity on Taiwan, Singapore, and other Chinese internet websites. According to reports, 1.78 meter tall Beijing Sport University student Kong Yansong was recently selected by netizens as the winner of a beautiful legs competition, her biggest characteristic being her pair of extremely slender and beautiful legs.

So... with Joe Tex's words echoing in my head, I laugh at my silliness and move on.

You know, it's not just in Second Life...

I know, I promised not to count down, but tomorrow (or maybe now--do they use GMT, or South African time?) Ubuntu 9.04, aka "Jaunty Jackalope", will be officially released.

I was hoping to do something in its honor, namely take a picture in SL with two friends replicating the "circle of friends" Ubuntu logo, or more specifically the photo that was, for a while, intended to be the gdm (GNOME login manager) login screen for the early Ubuntu "Warty Warthog" release... but then I remembered the controversy.

If you'd asked me, I'd have said that the people photographed were from a dance troupe. One man and two women, probably in their 20s, fit and slender, each clasping the other two at the adjacent elbow, standing in a circle (OK, a triangle) and looking up at the viewer. All dressed reasonably--well, the man only had on jeans, which store owners of the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" variety would object to--but...

One of the women had the audacity to be nicely endowed, and perhaps the studio was somewhat colder than usual.

As Roger Zelazny wrote in Lord of Light, "Then the fit hit the Shan."

The Release Candidate artwork was changed so fast your head would spin. I was disappointed. It seemed to me to be knuckling under to the prude contingent.

I still hope to recreate that image... but it will forever be tainted by the response to the original.

UPDATE: Since you probably never saw the artwork in question, here it is:

Thibedeau

I had a little time to explore tonight, and after looking around a store Fashion Consolidated I decided to check out the rest of the sim.

Thibedeau (I wondered about that spelling, but Google turns up a lot of entries for Thib[aeio]deau, so I'll withhold judgement) is, I think, best viewed at night. There's a curious tortoise...


...a robot with a TV for a head...


...and at the walkway to Wasabi Pills, a store with fairly nice skins for very reasonable prices, glowing crystals.


I've not shown you all there is to see, so do take a look. It's like a midway without the noise and rigged games; fun to stroll through and marvel at.

Celebrity-inspired avatars

Over at New World Notes, there's been a couple of entries with polls asking which celebrity people think inspired an avatar shown in a face shot.

On the first one, I was totally wrong; on the current one, I have no idea at all, an indication, I'm sure, of how little I pay attention to current celebrities. (Just part of the transition to being an official old fogey, I guess.)

Goodness knows there are stores that sell avatar shapes and skins similarly "inspired". I wonder how long it will be before the lawyers come down on them?

OK, I won't do a countdown with blog entries, but...

...it's only four days until the official release of Ubuntu 9.04, aka "Jaunty Jackalope." I've been running the beta (now the release candidate), and I'm very happy with it. Do check it out.

Monsters vs. Aliens

I got to see Monsters vs. Aliens. It was great fun, and I am still so jealous... Gallaxhar may be evil, but either he or whatever device he had making clothing for Susan had really great fashion sense. :)

Lest you think whimsy is all there is to Whimsy...

I should show you this, featuring one of the many beautiful things to be seen there:


Of course, whimsy still prevails amid the beauty; last night, while AFK, company dropped in, so to speak. My gracious landlady Cheyenne and her breathtaking partner in the surreal, Sweetie were there. We chatted for a while, and Sweetie incarnated as multiple musical bots, leading to an impromptu dance:

In the Casablanca Hotel

I was wandering about and happened upon the Casablanca Hotel. It's quite opulent!

There was a lovely room that I couldn't resist posing in for some photos. I don't wish to slight the many creators of SL, but I have to say that I love the work of Long Awkward Pose and the flowing skirt of Rock Me Amadeus's Blossoming Sakura outfit.

Trying the Shadow Viewer again...

OK... I tried the Shadow Viewer again. It didn't crash on me, but OTOH I didn't teleport, which seemed to be correlated with the crashes before.

I saw my shadow. (Thank goodness I'm not a groundhog.) On the other hand, the shadows still seem odd. Moving the camera around causes strange shadows to come and go in a very unrealistic fashion. (This will finally push me to try machinima, so I can show you what I mean.)

This is still very much under development; I hope that it will improve.

Whimsical Turtle

One of the things that makes Whimsy so wonderful is that there's always something new and delightful.

Today I discovered this turtle:


If you touch it, it will pull back into its shell for a time, and then come back out. It's very cute!

Happy Easter

To those of you who celebrate Easter, happy Easter.

Poetik Velvets

I've been away a couple of weekends, and hence haven't been in SL much. I hope that will change for a while.

I decided to go exploring and went to some of the places New World Notes listed as most-photographed on Koinup. The most curious one was Poetik Velvets.

I am not sure why it's so named. You arrive and find yourself on hills reminiscent of the stripes on mattresses, with clumps of ghostly kitchen utensils sprouting all over. I'd call it "Spatula City," with apologies to Weird Al. Not to give the wrong impression; at midnight, it's gorgeous, the trees alight with glowing leaves.

I didn't have much time to explore, but I did get in one photo. Do pay the sim a visit.

PS: OK, for those who peeked at the full image, I got in one photo worth showing.

2nd Sex (Slight Return)

I'm happy to see that 2nd Sex is opened once again, though Lillie Yifu says she probably won't post often to it. Even if she were to never post there again, it's still very much worth reading.

Thank you, Lillie.

Speaking of trying things...

...I had a chance to try SL on an Eee netbook.

It was a disaster. Even at the lowest settings, graphics were horrid, frame rate was about 0.4 fps, and in short order it died, once taking the system down with it.

Maybe someday with the nVidia Ion?

Running on Beta

I switched over to the Jaunty Jackalope beta, so I could try out Boy Lane's "Shadow Viewer", an SL client with the features of Cool Viewer and with real shadows (that you have to enable via a "hardware option" on the graphics settings).

Jaunty Jackalope is working fine. I wish I could say the same for "Shadow Viewer"; it crashes on me. I think I see the shadows, but I need to get into position and set the sun's position so I know where the shadows should be. What I saw didn't quite seem consistent.

P.S. Good heavens... a week between posts! I will do better, I promise.

Priority inversion

In the context of parallel programming, a priority inversion occurs when a low-priority task gets its paws on a resource that a higher priority task needs. The results can vary from irritating to catastrophic.

If Tateru Nino's recent post in Massively is correct, I fear that LL has fallen afoul of a priority inversion; it's decided to give precedence to implementing the controversial "Adults Only"... one can't call it a proposal, can one? LL has decided to do it, though they are at least going through the motions of wanting resident feedback. I wish I didn't believe it.

Not a phoenix, but...

It's been way too long since I've written about the beautiful, talented, and always impeccably dressed Xaxoqual Mandelbrot.

When last she appeared here, she was a mourning dove--but she's now a Victorian Crowned Pigeon. If you're like me, I had never heard of that species, but follow the link and look at the picture, or look at the images here, and you'll be as amazed as I was. Her avatar is every bit as lovely as those photos.

Countdown to Jackalope

I jumped the gun a while back; the countdown to Ubuntu 9.04 is now seriously underway, the beta version having been released last week.

I hope you'll give Ubuntu a try if you've not used Linux before, or if you tried it long ago and gave up on it. In either case, you will be pleasantly surprised, I think. If you now use Windows, the easiest way to get started is with Wubi.

Not to Scale

I've mentioned Micro City, a place high above Northstar built to a small scale.

Now there's a region in southeast Mammatus built to an even smaller scale... and that gladdens the heart of this would-be giantess. Peeking at the buildings there, I think we have David Lawl to thank for it--so, thank you Mr. Lawl!

ERRATUM: Mesha Sewell kindly tracked down the correct information; we have Katrina Schilling to thank for building and laying out the lovely miniature city... but still, as creator of the buildings, David Lawl still merits our thanks and our admiration of his skill. Thanks to you both.

Away, alas

I've been away this past weekend, and will be this coming weekend as well, visiting family and friends.

I will be on SL when I can, but that won't be a lot for a bit... not only will I miss dear SL friends, but I will be itching to take more pictures now that I have a new graphics card. :) I promise to show you the results.

How can you tell?

The first of Isaac Asimov's "Black Widowers" stories was titled "The Acquisitive Chuckle." The only thing I recall about it, or at least think that I recall, is that it had to do with someone who'd had something stolen from him, but had no idea just what it was--he only knew that he'd been robbed. The thief's intent was to create that situation, and thus bug the heck out of the victim.

One hears from time to time of inventory losses in SL. It occurred to me that while I think I've managed to escape that problem so far, how could I tell? I may well be the counterpart of the fellow in that story, and have lost something but not know it... but like him, in that not knowing would drive me crazy.

So, perhaps there is a use for something less than a full inventory backup, but more than nothing, i.e. an inventory listing, one line per item, so that you could at least periodically save that listing and run diff on it... so you could at least tell!

Sirikata

Grace Dunnough over at Phasing Grace has a post about a BSD-licensed Open Source platform for virtual worlds, Sirikata. (I question the wisdom of BSD licensing, as it permits the infamous embrace, extend, and extinguish technique.)

It looks very interesting, and their design appears to be intended to avoid some of the problems with SL. Check out the demo video and especially the talk on the architecture.

Am I PG?

Not according to the people I met in the Gossip Girl sims. Wearing an opaque, long-sleeved turtleneck sweater and jeans while well-endowed was, according to them, lewd--in a place where blatant BDSM gear was on sale with, as far as I can tell, the complete approval of the people managing the sims.

So now, LL has announced that it will segregate "adult" content to its own continent, where the meaning of "adult" is yet to be specified but supposedly only covers a few percent of current SL content. The status of skin sellers is one concern, and apparently one must censor one's own profile and picks to conform to PG standards. (Jeska Linden, in the SL Forums: "...as I mentioned (and per our Community Standards) any content displayed within your profile (including picks) should confirm to the overall PG standards.")

This concerns me. I hope you'll take the time to express your opinion in the forum threads (now thread) dedicated to the issues.

UPDATE: TINYDANCING has a hilarious takeoff on LL's announcement. (At least I hope it's a takeoff...)

Paging Lamont Cranston!

Hamlet Au writes in New World Notes to point out and comment on a comment made by Qarl Linden, dated March 14th, from which I quote:

i can't make any promises - but i've heard rumors [dynamic shadows] will appear (as a debugging option) in the next viewer - so in the next couple weeks, perhaps?

I've been looking forward to that ever since I heard about it. Time to practice the happy dance!

Catching up on sleep

Once upon a time I could pull the occasional all-nighter, crash the next afternoon, sleep a while and awake feeling wretched, have supper, go to bed and awake seemingly unperturbed the next day.

Those days are no more. Wednesday night and Thursday night I got little sleep, and I paid for it big time this weekend, sleeping a LOT. I therefore have spent very little time on the grid, and I regret that--I miss my SL friends. I have to learn to conserve my spoons.

"It's not that easy being green..."

Actually, it really isn't--not when you're surrounded by things that are greener still.

(Now I've done it--I have that damned folk song in my head, complete with the irritating guitar run in the chorus.)

It's just-spring, or at least it will be in a week, and I really, really wanted to get away from the cold weather that held sway earlier this week in Iowa, so I went into SL.. and happened across an outfit that, while the collar could use work, was bright and all white and that yellowish green that the leaves are when they first appear, and so I bought it and put it on, along with Aphrodite's lime colored Vintish heels. It cheered me up.

A little later, word came from Frick of a charming free green skin they were (and I think still are) offering. On it went, and I pulled out the green Bonita hair from an all colors pack I got long ago as well. Green, hmmm... yes. Chakryn Forest, standing in one of the lovely beams of sunlight falling through the leaves, and...


I was reminded of the first time I saw Key limes. "Hey, those aren't green!" Just goes to show the importance of context, I guess.

Enter the Jackalope

It won't be long before the Ubuntu 8.10 blurb here changes to announce the approach of Ubuntu 9.04, code named "Jaunty Jackalope". The Alpha 5 version is out for those interested in trying it.

The ext4 file system will be supported, but not the default. I am thinking of converting to ext4, in hopes of faster I/O for things such as the SL client cache. We shall see...

...and it won't be long now, just about a month and a half.

How much for a nice SL computer, rerevisited

Sigh... you'd think I was hoping for an income tax refund or something; I'm looking yet again at a nice inexpensive computer to run SL.

I went to a $70 motherboard, the ECS GF8200A; I don't think the Jetway's offered any more. I couldn't pass up another $10 for a 500 GB hard drive rather than 250, so it's $60 rather than $50, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD502IJ. Same case as before, the APEVIA QPACK-2; same DVD burner.

Ah, but the CPU... now you can get a real AM2+ Athlon 64 X2, 2.7 GHz, 2 MB of Level 3 cache, for $60. That added cache will help, and it can take full advantage of the AM2+ socket. The motherboard will take DDR2 1066 RAM, and 4 GB of G.Skill (2 x 2GB) costs $53; more than DDR2 800, but hey, it's still not very much at all.

Again, the graphics card will be our biggest expense; the Sparkle SFPX98GT1024D3H is a 9800 GT with a gigabyte of RAM on the card; while only two have reviewed it on newegg.com as I write this, both give it five eggs, and one of them mentions that he is an SL resident and that it makes a big difference... and that he had moved up from a 9600 GT, which is what we were thinking of last time. $140.

Total, aside from shipping: a hair under $505. Now, if only they gave the dimensions of the graphics card (some of them push the edge of what can go in Micro ATX cases) and its power requirements (they can be very hefty these days).

Politics and Interoperability Standards

Do read Gwyneth Llewelyn's lastest blog post, "Politics and Interoperability Standards". It's a very good antidote to the torrents of idiocy surrounding the subject matter.

I'm behind again: Imprudence test version patched to allow flexible sculpted prims

Tsk, tsk... I am behind. It's a week and a half since the Imprudence folks announced a testing version of their client that includes a patch to allow flexible sculpted prims. (Only Windows and Linux versions, alas; the Imprudence project is in dire need of Macintosh mavens interested in working on the client.) Again, it's a testing version: if it breaks, it breaks; use at your own risk. Also, there are performance issues to be dealt with before it becomes official.

But... if you're a builder in SL, wouldn't it be nice to have a head start on trees that bend in the breeze rather than rigidly rotating around their roots? (Somewhere, Old English poets are smiling at that last part...) Flags that flutter? (Might as well keep them happy a bit longer.) If we may hope, prim breasts that jiggle more realistically?

UPDATE: I've run it, and it's as Foxbean says in her comment; the effect is wonderful, but the rendering of the prims deteriorates badly as you move back, even a relatively short distance.

SL does that kind of thing; if you see reference to LOD (loss of detail, I think it stands for), that's what they're talking about. As you get farther away from an object, the rendering is sketchier, just as in RL you can't see as much detail of a more distant object. It saves time, and goodness knows that's important--but something about the flexible sculpted prims modification causes LOD to happen too quickly, at too short a distance. I hope that's corrected, and the performance issues worked through, soon.

Double take

I was wandering about the web when I came across the now defunct Mean Girls Guide to SL blog. (Its successor is The SL Revolution, for those interested.) One article wished a fellow happy birthday, and featured a photo at which I did a double take.

I double checked to make sure I didn't misremember, and I didn't. Humans have six abdominal muscles. Count 'em, six. The number visible in the photo: eight.

So, I'm curious: how common is that? Have you seen a non-anatomically correct skin? (We're not talking about the well-known omission from the male avatar.)

Beards: Could ZZ Top come to SL?

I've seen clean-shaven men in SL, and I've seen some with the Don Johnson look (yeah, showing my age) and some with goatees or the current style of facial hair in the fashion of detail striping on cars--basically anything doable via the skin texture.

Are there prim beards out there somewhere in SL? If ZZ Top wanted to perform in SL, would they have to give up the beards? I'm curious.

Planet Mongo

My dear friend Foxbean Liebknecht said she'd found a great place... and it certainly is.


Planet Mongo features a city in the sky--as you can tell from the name, it's inspired by the Sky City of the Hawkmen in Flash Gordon. It's beautifully done, and well worth your time to visit and explore. While you're contemplating your conquest of the universe, you can shop... but don't even dream of any funny business; you are being watched!


Thank you so much, dear Foxbean, for inviting me to this amazing place.

A Very Strange Experience

I seem not to have very much time in SL lately, and that at strange hours. Last week I was up far too early and window shopping at one of the many, many places that joining Fashion Consolidated will let you hear about, when someone addressed me directly, saying "Hello."

I said "Hello" in reply, and then the person addressing me told me that I was too big and would die soon of breast cancer!

Perhaps there's truth to a certain theory.

EPIC Busty Girl Fashion Show

EPIC is planning a fashion event weekend to raise funds for the Breast Cancer Foundation. The date is not yet set. To quote an announcement:

We all know how hard it is to find a good, sexy outfit for that stage show, or that friends party. or even for some of us how hard it is to match tops with outfits and so forth. The idea is that we can give light to the corners of the busty fashion world, promote boobies in SL and maybe create not only revenue for those creators, but maybe bring some new ideas to the table, meet some of your favorite creators, or even just shed some light on the busty side of Second Life.

During the event, they will take donations for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Clothing makers and prim breast makers wishing to help should IM Annie Carnell or Tanya Lalonde.

P.S. Design

I was very happy yesterday to see a sign at a branch store of P.S. Design, a creator of clothing that works with Implant Nation prim breasts--they are now making clothing that can be worn with Sensations products, and have clothing to accompany Icon Allen's prim breasts under development.

This is a very welcome move, and I look forward to seeing the results.

MoonOS

Some people don't much care for the default Ubuntu color scheme, which leans towards the orange and brown.

If you share that opinion, you might wish to look into MoonOS, which is based on Ubuntu, uses Enlightenment DR17 and LXDE so that it looks very good even on modest hardware, and has a color scheme designed by a very talented artist. It's so lovely I'm giving serious thought to trying it out.

Speaking of pointers to blogs...

...do take a look at Mooching with Marnix, a blog from Marnix Malifozik, a relatively new SL resident I had the pleasure of meeting recently.

It's far too easy to forget what it's like to be new to something, and I appreciate the chance not only to see SL through other eyes, but through new eyes once again. Thank you, Marnix.

SLEX and the City

You may well already know about the fashion blog SLEX and the City, but I just happened across it last night. It's worth visiting just to see the photography; it's very nicely done.

A short discussion of logic and logical fallacies

For practical purposes, the study of logic starts with Aristotle--if only because his writings have largely survived.

Logic has to do with how one makes valid inferences, i.e. if I know that some things are true, what can I know must also be true? A logical system consists of a set of postulates and a set of inference rules that determine what are valid inferences in that system.

Aristotle came up with what we call "syllogisms", schemata of valid inferences, such as "if all X are Y and all Y are Z, then all X are Z". The premises are the if part, and the conclusion is the then part. Under Aristotelian logic, if you know two premises of the given form (where you consistently replace the X, Y, and Z with classes of things), then you can infer the conclusion (again, replacing the variables consistently). For example, "If all men are mammals and all mammals are animals, then all men are animals."

Oh, yes... that "consistency" bit also forbids equivocation, i.e. using a word in two different ways. "Animal" not only means "one of those things that aren't vegetable or mineral," but is sometimes used to mean a beast or savage ("You animal!"); the consistency rule forbids switching meanings in midstream.

That's pretty much where things stood, aside from the work of the scholastics (who did things like invent mnemonics for the valid syllogisms, using vowels to represent the forms of the premises and conclusion), until the 19th century and the development of mathematical or symbolic logic.

The whole point about logical fallacies is that one cannot make valid inferences from them. Those who use them either don't know any better or do know better and are attempting to deceive; in either case, the supposed conclusion is suspect. (Not necessarily false, but suspect, since it doesn't follow from the premises.) You'll have to decide for yourself which of the two (ignorance or dishonesty) applies in any given case.

If only...

I actually went out to see a movie today... and in the seemingly endless stream of public service announcements, warnings to turn off cell phones, pagers, and so forth, and trailers for upcoming features was one for Monsters vs. Aliens, a coming CGI animation:



I am so jealous of the Susan Murphy character...

Sliced Lime Buddha

I was looking around in Mocha, a lovely place, wintry in spots (eek! Actually going to a cold place in SL during RL winter?!) that I saw mentioned in the excellent blog Living with the me..., when I wandered into Lime and saw a magnificent golden statue of the Buddha:


At first I thought it was one huge sculpted prim, but a closer look made me wonder--it looked almost like a contour map, or as if it were carved from golden-hued wood so that you could see where the carving crossed from one ring of the original tree to another. Looking at it from more to the side emphasized the effect:


and finally, a view directly from the side showed the true structure, and I gasped:

The Buddha was built up from a series of slices! How different from the stylized Buddha at the Varosha temple!

The Post of the Beast

I noticed the latest post at Cheyenne's wonderful blog--it's her thousandth post! Hmmm, I wondered, how many entries have I posted here? blogger counts the number posted each year, so I added up the numbers from 2006 (OMG, has it been that long?) to this year, and got the result 666! (Not 666 factorial, 666--eek! 666 factorial posts would require a lot of typing.)

My last post, about the Crystal Kingdom, was the post of the beast, so to speak!

Sigh... just goes to show how firm a hold superstitions have on us, despite our best efforts.

Dressing for Mardi Gras

This year, Mardi Gras is next Tuesday as I write, February 24th. If there's any clothing at all in SL that reminds me of Mardi Gras, it's the magnificent, ornate, richly colored and detailed clothing available at the Crystal Queendom.

I am very happy to report that upstairs from the Crystal Queendom, there is now the Crystal Kingdom, so that men now have access to outfits just as regal, vivid, and detailed. It's not been around as long, so there aren't as many outfits to choose from, but I have no doubt that will change--and what's there is utterly breathtaking.

Enticement

Back when I started in Second Life (Oh, dear... I've turned into my parents with tales of "back when..."), if you wished to express your opinion, you used the facilities that existed for First Life as well: Blogger, Wordpress, etc.

Now there are social web sites for SL residents, for example Snapzilla, SLProfiles, and Second Avatar--but if you've spent time and effort developing a name and audience elsewhere, is it wise to divide your attention?

Well, Second Avatar has some enticement for residents to post photos and make blog entries: they offer to pay you for it.

I have put too much into this blog to abandon it, and the limits Second Avatar puts on image size are much stricter than Blogger or flickr. OTOH, I do feel a bit guilty about having set up an account at Second Avatar and having let it sit for so long, so I will start posting a little bit there.

UPDATE: You're absolutely right, Anonymous. You can find my Second Avatar page here.

UPDATE: This just isn't my day. The above link is only accessible to those who have a Second Avatar account and are logged in. I'm still trying to figure out what link I can give that the general public can access without having to sign up. Right now I'm not sure whether there is one.

UPDATE: The Web Site Formerly Known As SLProfiles is now ProfileSLive.

ONE MORE: OK, let's try this for a link.

I Kissed a Linden

"...for the first time/I kissed a Linden/and I may do it again..."

Apologies to Jill Sobule, and it was a hug, really, but it was a wonderful start to Valentine's Day to visit Isle of View [pause to remember the great Jimmie Spheeris].

It's a charming place, all hearts and flowers and a giant Cupid statue at the center:


People were gathered there... many of the Mentors and volunteers who do so much for SL--and suddenly, there was Cupid Linden! There were "Hug a Volunteer" and "Hug a Linden" signs and poseballs, and I couldn't resist.



I met many wonderful people, and a wonderful bear and cheerfully ravenous little alligator riding a pink, red, and white snail carrying a sign whose text I should have written down, but which I think said "Send more tourists--they're delicious!" Michael Flatley should watch out; the little 'gator was quite the Irish stepdancer!

I know what it is to hate the coming of Valentine's Day because it rubs one's nose in one's lack of romance... but I wish you all a wonderful day.

Chemical Kisses

With the erratic hours I've been keeping on SL, I've not kept up with Victorian fashion. It was a pleasure, therefore, to receive a notecard with a landmark for Chemical Kisses, and to visit and see the many exquisite dresses to be found there. If you love such clothing, do investigate.

Victoria Bushfire Relief Fund

SL vendors are responding to the tragic fires in Australia. I have seen announcements from Long Awkward Pose and from >TRUTH<, and I expect there will be others. Do check them out, as well as the official Red Cross site.

UPDATE: Hamlet Au has a good article with a pointer to a more complete list of vendors selling items with proceeds going to benefit fire victims.

Culture of Secrecy?

Say what one will about how the system of patent and copyright has been corrupted and abused, the original intent was good: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." (Emphasis on "for limited times", though copyright owners seem to be able to buy laws to endlessly extend those limited times.)

We don't have that in SL, nor do we seem to have the culture of science or scholarly fields, where people publish their results (or perish, in the sense of not getting credit, as Tartaglia learned the hard way) and build on what others have done. Instead, it appears that SL creators treat their discoveries as trade secrets, and I fear that slows progress. Even Isaac Newton, inventor (along with, but independently of, Leibniz) of the integral and differential calculus, and the laws of motion, characterized his work as possible because he stood on the shoulders of giants.

What can be done about this?

Still Wearing Red...

It's a day late, but I couldn't pass up another photo in a red dress that I love:


I think it shows off the hair (Goldie Locks, Aphrodite) beautifully.

Go Red for Women

I've been distracted; I had totally forgotten about National Wear Red Day!
For more info, follow the link, and also see the Go Red for Women web site. Get informed and take care of yourself and those you care about.

So... in honor of Wear Red Day, here I am in the Minoan Empire wearing the lovely RFyre Ondami crimson and gold outfit inspired by the famous "Snake Goddess" figurine.

Sudden jump

Google Analytics shows that viewership spiked yesterday: seventy-four views after a long winter doldrums (or is that just one doldrum?). I haven't been on SL much lately, and hence haven't written all that much, and of course, everyone's occupied with other things over Christmas and New Year's Day.

I have to suspect one possible cause: that article from a year ago that Sorcha (/me waves... "Hi, Sorcha!" *hugs*) commented on. In it, I did some wordplay on Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey"... and it turns out that has been done a bit more thoroughly by a group calling itself Minnesotans for Global Warming. They posted a YouTube video with their parody, "Two Below Honey"... which was promptly taken down after a complaint from Van Morrison and Exile Productions.

So, "two below honey" turns up as number two on the list of search terms taking people to this blog. Sorry, folks. What you seek isn't here, though I hope you find some diversion here... and alas, Van the Man has seen fit to cause it to be unavailable.

I am so sorry...

For someone who says she loves comments, I don't seem to notice some of them. I've mentioned this before, but this has really driven it home to me: a wonderful, wonderful young woman who I hadn't heard from in some time commented on a post I made in January 2007. I first saw it today. (Dear Sorcha, thank you, and I am so, so sorry! Dear Reader, don't miss her blog, Third Life; it's a joy to read.)

I can get emailed posted comments--if I individually ask for them for each post. (If you're reading this, Blogger people, this is one place where you can learn from LiveJournal! At least give me, the blog "owner", the option of asking to be emailed all posted comments...) Sigh.

For comparison...

My friend JanBruce Zepedzki came by and wanted to see "Supersize Me" in effect and asked me to take a picture, so here's a shot for comparison. Ms. Zepedzki is unusual among SL residents in that her avatar height is fairly close to the actual average height of American women (5'4"), and I have on heels and a hat that adds somewhat to the effect.

I'm happy to say that Selsey Seelowe is working to improve the poses and walk, so it will only get better. (And I'll adjust pants lengths as well; that's already problematic for those with very long legs, and the stretch makes it more so.)

Supersize Me! revisited

I was talking with Cheyenne and Sweetie when they were adding still more flora to Whimsy, and they wanted to see the "Supersize Me!" AO. I tried it without the shape--at least my hair and shoes would still fit--and it wasn't bad. I'm fine with being really slender, just not anorexic.

Aside from the walk and some funky standing poses, it was fun. Something about the way it's done fakes out the physics engine; had I officially been twelve feet tall, I shouldn't be able to get in the door of my home, but I was able to. I was able to wear the edited 3.5 meter version of Goldie Locks' "Jordan" hair without having hair underground.

Sweetie took a picture of us (I will have to go back to check whether the "Earth Ro-Man" of the infamous movie Robot Monster, in which the evil aliens were guys in gorilla suits with deep sea diving helmets, was in the photo); I'll ask if it's OK to put it here. In the meantime, here's a photo I took later on by the entrance to my place so you can get an idea of scale.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

If I have managed to get anyone on the receiving end of email from "FanBox", I am very sorry. I urge anyone who receives email from FanBox to run, not walk, to mark it as spam.

UPDATE: more info here.

To drive the cold winter away...

It's barely past the true beginning of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, and it's been very cold. (Al Gore just got through talking about global warming in Washington DC during a winter travel advisory with travel not advised thanks to the ice and sleet on the roads.)

I am therefore very grateful for places like Whimsy, where winter is well-behaved and mercifully short, and flowers, in RL an evanescent symbol of mono no aware, can be around just about any time... Thank you, Cheyenne.

"When you're weary, feelin' small..."

...go to Micro City, high above Northstar. You may still be weary, but at least you won't feel small any more:


Micro City is a small area built at scale, sort of like Madurodam in Holland (though far less detailed, alas). It's mostly urban. The relatively small area means you have to be careful with your composition, but if one of the formative moments of your childhood was watching Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, you can realize your fantasies a bit.

I succumbed to temptation and got Selsey Seelowe's "Supersize Me!" package, which has an animation override with an on/off arrow in the display, a shape, and a pair of boots. Something about the animation or a pose that comes with it stretches your avatar past the usual limits, and then applying the shape bulks one up to compensate for the stretching. Since the shape parameters only go so far, the stretch is limited to what the maximum shape sizes can compensate for--and while I didn't use a height-measuring device, I can believe that I reached the claimed twelve feet in height.

(The boots are necessary because the foot size 0 that shoe makers target is far too small for the stretched avatar.)

I adjusted the shape as best I could to try to preserve the proportions of my unstretched shape; I couldn't pull it off. Animations that work for you normally will have to be modified to work at the new height... and believe me, you do not want the walk animation that comes with the package. I hope it's possible to override or delete one of the standing poses; I have never stood around with my arms raised above my head, crossed at the wrist, and I don't want to start, even in SL. Speaking of standing poses, you'll note that in the following photo, my bootheels have gone wanderin', as Bob Dylan would say, underground. [pause to fight off the urge to reference "Subterranean Homesick Blues"]


Now, I hasten to add that I think Ms. Seelowe has done an amazing job of overcoming the limitations built into the SL avatar. (If I may nudge you once again to vote for VWR-1258... again, it's not just about breasts.) Moreover, it's been improved already. I hope that it is or becomes more customizable, and perhaps another style of shoes could accompany it. If you wish to move up in the world, give it a try.

New blog feature

I wonder whether there's an RSS feed or something similar to notify one of new Blogger features when they come out.

You can now add a list of (public) followers of your blog and give people the ability to, with a single click, follow your blog... and that feature is now here.

Thanks to Cheyenne Palisades, who knew about it and took advantage of it before I did; I saw it in her blog.

P.S. Yes, I split an infinitive, but the alternative made it unclear whether the blogger or the would-be followers were doing something with a single click.

Eek! Problems with the profile picture

Apologies to everyone about the recent profile picture change.

It looked nice at a larger size, but when it is shrunk for display, it looked like I was getting ready for a remake of the second ST:TOS pilot or some bad horror movie, with my eyes glowing. Creepy.

Decisions, decisions...

The kerfuffle over LL's acquisition of XStreetSL and OnRez has had one happy consequence for me--I discovered the XStreetSL forums. Or perhaps I rediscovered them; when I tried to sign up, I found that I'd already done so and forgotten about it! (So if I'm any indication, perhaps the prim-and-mortar stores have little to fear...)

I found the "Wanted" forum, and posted a request for something that, looking back, I'd been after since December 2007, for heaven's sake: an extreme corset that uses transparency to shrink one's waist past the limits of the stock SL avatar. (May I refer the Gentle Reader once again to VWR-1258? It's not just about breasts...)

Zot! In well under a day, I received many responses, and now I know about the wonderful products of KaS Designs, P.S.Y.C.H.O, and the House of Alisha--and a quick overview of how to do it myself.

The KaS Designs corset emulates the RL process of gradual shrinkage. Alisha's outfit lets one shrink one's waistline down to as little as one inch, or 2.54 cm for those using rational systems of measurement, with a few clicks. (It also is far more than just a corset.) All are beautifully wrought (and P.S.Y.C.H.O. has multiple styles, some on the scary side).

Of course, sufficiently large prim breasts get in the way of the effect, so I won't be emulating Mlle. Polaire every day... but it's a joy to have the option. Thank you to everyone who responded to my query, and especially thank you to those who make such fine products. (Not to mention that as a great side effect, I found out about Alisha's gorgeous historical clothing.)

Breathtaking historical reproductions at the House of Alisha

The delightful Alisha Ultsch was kind enough to demonstrate for me some clothing she makes that will let me realize yet another fantasy I've had for a while. I went to her store, the House of Alisha, and while SL acted up again so that I couldn't buy the item I was specifically there for, while looking my mouth fell open... There were rooms full of lovely historical reproductions of medieval and Baroque era clothing.

It just goes to show how little of SL one can know after years on the grid, and how much there is to see. If you have any interest in that sort of clothing, by all means go there. You'll be very impressed.

UPDATE: Take a look at her flickr photostream.

Standing out from the crowd

Back in the Cretaceous Period, when I was a child, I puzzled over something I saw every so often in the newspaper classified ads:

White Space
DOES
Increase Readership!

Later, I realized what was meant--in an otherwise densely-packed classified ad page, an ad that had some white space would stand out from the crowd and get people to read it. (OK, it would increase the newspaper's ad revenue, too, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence. :))

I was reminded of that when I looked over the comments on this post, and had to smile. Somehow,

Gigantic [Breasts]
DO
Increase Readership!

just doesn't have the same ring to it, though.

(Thank you, Andrew.)

Playing with GIMP

I found a lovely stairway in Midnight City and had to take a picture. The austere black and white background asked for a black and white image... almost.

"Been shopping?" "No, been shopping!"

So, LL has acquired XStreetSL and OnRez. In a curious parallel to RL, there is much talk about how this will affect prim-and-mortar stores.

Initially, not much, I'd say. Only a fifth of "heavy Second Life users" regularly shop via XStreetSL. As others have pointed out, shopping in SL can be a social activity; also, there's nothing like actually seeing something you're thinking of buying. Photos of clothing can hide a multitude of sins that the careful shopper can check for on an in-store model. ("I wonder what this looks like at midnight/with Torley's Watermelon Sky Windlight setting/etc....") Were I in the market for a house or furniture, I'd certainly want to walk through it or sit on it.

On the other hand, it can be amazingly difficult to find something even if you know the seller, or even if you've seen it before and are trying to find it again! If they can provide a decent search, it will be great for comparison shopping--though in a reversal of RL, that might mean people will use the web site to narrow the possibilities down, then go to the prim-and-mortar store for a final inspection and purchase. (That doesn't bode well for SL malls.) Also, people might go to a web site purely out of frustration at waiting for textures to trickle into the battleship gray world that SL stores all too often are when one teleports to them.

It will be interesting to see whether SL residents shop more via the web site that results--if they don't, can LL afford to keep it going? I would seriously consider subscribing to a web site that provides a really good search and comparison shopping facility, but would still go to stores in SL for the final purchase.

Thank you, Whiteraven Slade!

Her post "Second Life Culture: Preface" should, I think, be handed to new residents. (And the reminder was good for me, too. I have to watch my tendency to evangelize sometimes.)

The Black Dress

I always seem to come back to the black dress, little or otherwise. Maybe it's from watching Breakfast at Tiffany's; who can forget Audrey Hepburn in that wonderful dress? I know I can't... so when Lemania Indigo came out with, as she puts it, THE DRESS, I snatched it up. I'm still looking for pearls and a tiara, which shows that I, to my shame, was unaware of Ms. Indigo's blog until I started writing this very entry, as she mentions where to find them.

Even so, I'm delighted with the results.

Yet another SL viewer

Check out omvviewer. It's especially nice for Debian and Ubuntu users because there are repositories for those Linux distributions, making it as easy as using synaptic or typing "apt-get install omvviewer" once you've put the appropriate repository on the list.

It's a bird! It's a prim! No, it's...

I was chatting with a new friend and she referenced something that turns out to be a file that describes the parameters that affect avatar appearance (to you, since it's just used by your client software). It's the "Linden avatar definition" file, and that phrase has the obvious acronym lad, so the file's name is avatar_lad.xml.

I'm sorry, but I have to laugh, because it sounds like the name of a superhero, or maybe a superhero's sidekick.

In any case, it's an interesting file, and I'm grateful to my new friend for pointing it out to me.

Another SL machinima request

A while back I wished out loud that someone would do a machinima to back Ishmael Reed's glorious cultural mashup of the Old West and Ancient Egypt, "I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra."

Now I have another wish.

Goodness knows that lots of people have done riffs on Pachelbel's Canon (you recognize it in Blues Traveler's "Hook", don't you?), and when you hear the main theme of "Sanvean", you settle back and think you're in for a pleasant, familiar trip... but the very first time through it diverges from the familiar chord progression, and then it goes off in a very different direction. The vocalise prevents any definite interpretation; is the climax triumph? Keening? No clue is given, so it can be used in many contexts.

I'd love to see what machinima people might come up with to accompany it.

Hollow hair

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men..." --T.S. Eliot

I happened to be at a store when the owner/designer was there demoing one of the outfits in person. Lovely lady, with phenomenal hair. I IMed her asking where she got it, or did she make it, in which case I'd buy some right away? She gave me a landmark. I thanked her, and after buying an outfit, I headed to the landmarked spot.

Sure enough, it was gorgeous... until I tried on the demo.

SL has some kind of bug having to do with dueling textures with alpha; it doesn't get the occlusion (which one is "in front" and hence blocks the other from sight) right, with paradoxical looking results that would make Escher proud. This hair must trip up that bug, because as you pan around yourself, checking the hair out, tresses vanish and reappear in a way that breaks verisimilitude badly.

Were it not for that bug, I'd buy the hair in a heartbeat. Please, LL, could you fix it? [Wanders off to the JIRA...]

Redheads

I'm not a redhead in SL; SL is how I wish I were. In RL my hair is gray.

But in SL my hair can be gloriously, outrageously red. There's a flickr group for SL redheads, the very reasonably named Redheads of Second Life, and it has some glorious photos. Do give it a look.

(Of course, no discussion of redheads in SL could omit Codebastard Redgrave, photographer, scripter, and maximally callipygous resident of SL.)

So, RL redheads, know that I envy you, and I hope you don't begrudge my partaking of a bit of that aura in the virtual world. (Don't miss this collection of redhead history, legends, quotes, and images.)

Word of the day

My command of Spanish is so-so. My vocabulary is mediocre, and I'm still fuzzy on the subjunctive (among other things). Back in the day, I would spend some time rummaging through the Spanish section of a Spanish-English dictionary, looking for idioms and words that struck my fancy.

Nowadays, I have a vast corpus of text available to at least try to read, thanks to the web... and I had the pleasure of finding a wonderful word in an SL blog that, while largely fashion-oriented, has the occasional essay: I started the joke... by Eden Forwzy. In particular, it's from the article title "Bienvenidos al locodromo!"

(Are the inverted exclamation point and question mark on the way out? I hope not. Spanish would be the poorer for it. In English, just having the ending punctuation mark means that you can't indicate that only part of a sentence is exclaimed or interrogative, right? In Spanish, the equivalent sentence would end with ¿verdad?)

Now, if you were to insist that I translate, the best I could do would be "Welcome to the madhouse!" But look closer at locodromo. Etymologically you should recognize the Greek root that goes into "hippodrome", a racecourse (dromos) for horses (hippos). (OK, horses would be hippoi, wouldn't it?) How much more vivid the image of crazy people running around in circles!

So, thank you, Eden Forzwy. You've made my world a richer place.

Retro SL from Torley

I don't know whether anyone knows who's taken the most pictures in SL, but surely Torley Linden is near or at the top of the list. His cheerful attitude and trademark watermelon color scheme always bring a smile to my face.

That smile is even broader than usual now that I've seen two of his many photos on flickr: "Second Life: the classic adventure game" and "You have teleported to HERE ISLAND." They are SL photos done up in the style of games on classic 8-bit computers, and for those of us who remember the days of the Apple II, C-64, Atari, or the Tandy Color Computer, they bring an instant wave of nostalgia and remind us of how far we've come.

Thanks, Torley.

Flowers and tai chi in Apollo

The Lost Gardens of Apollo, and the whole Apollo sim, is a popular and beautiful place that's been around for some time. There's one spot where, surrounded by flowers and flowering trees, people can participate in the graceful art of tai chi.

It had been some time since I'd been there, so I thought I'd pay it a visit... and I arrived to see a glorious shower of daisies and other flowers around a group doing tai chi, and I had to take a picture:

It's not SL related, but...

I was emailed by someone asking if he could link to this blog, and whether I'd link to his.

Well... it's not at all SL related, I have to wonder how many people interested in his blog (about places to see in Mexico) would really be interested in my ramblings, and from the extraordinary list of links on his blog, perhaps I should have replied "I bet you say that to all the blogs," but Mexico Vacation Travel Trip Tips has such lovely photos and interesting articles about places in Mexico that I couldn't resist.

Kali Isle

I saw a mention of photography at Kali Isle, and had to go see.

I found a lovely sim with excellent landscaping and architecture and things to buy... and also found a "photo garden" populated with "photospheres" (OK, really hemispheres, but who's counting?) in which one can pose and modify various things, e.g. the background.

I had to try it out... and when I saw one with a dance pole, I succumbed to temptation. I am not a dancer, but as an RL klutz, the way one can gracefully dance just by "sitting on" a poseball is very appealing.


Yes, I should have worn something contrasting with the background or changed the background to contrast with the black dress, but the "flame" background was so lovely...

I suspect that Kali Isle is famous in SL; there are 32 flickr photos matching "Kali Isle". But if you haven't been there, do check it out. (And donate, too.)

What a relief...

So... the new RC client was released the other day, and I had to upgrade to it. I signed back on... and found SL running like molasses at Point Barrow.

Signed off and back on. Same thing. Teleported. Same thing. 3.2 frames per second. I gave up in disgust and went about my business.

Thank goodness it must have been some problem with servers or communications. When I signed on later, things were back to normal.

Whew!

Whoa!

You must see the magnificent photo in this entry in Shoshana Epsilon's blog.

Now, to show the difference between the really good SL photographers and putterers: I stumbled across similar lighting once while wandering around an island and happening across a very bright flame. My first thought wasn't to take advantage of it, but to pull out a face light--but it didn't work! That error in SL was nudging me towards a better photo, but I didn't listen, and didn't adapt and crop to put the lighting to best use.

So, this is a very good lesson for me, and I will learn from it and do better.

Return to ElvenDEEP

I couldn't resist TIGGS Beaumont's gracious invitation to explore ElvenDEEP further, so I went back to explore underwater this time, and it was a delight.

I wasn't really dressed to go underwater, but I took the plunge anyway; in SL you needn't worry about breathing, and your clothes never get wet. After walking through the rapids, there I was. The fish are gorgeous:


...and you can swim past other amazing things as well, like this giant oyster:


I will definitely be back to see what else awaits. Thank you so much, TIGGS Beaumont, and thank you as well to Bear Fangio, the creator of the wonder that is ElvenDEEP.

How much for a nice SL computer, revisited

Out upon it! I have waited three whole months together...

Well, almost three months, and my apologies to Sir John Suckling. (Yes, I know I blew the scansion.) But still, it's a good time to look at the "nice SL computer" again.

It's January, and AMD has come out with the Phenom II CPUs, so older CPUs have probably gone down in price. Maybe other components have as well.

You'll recall that we wound up with a price (ignoring shipping charges) of about $514. I saved the wish list from last time... but a straight then vs. now price comparison was impossible, because they don't sell the motherboard or graphics card any more.

OTOH, the RAM is now $40 instead of $60, and let's say we bite the bullet and go with a Micro ATX case and power supply for $100 rather than the separate components that added up to $170. That gives us $90 to play with before we get back to the $514 price. Not shabby, eh?...

But wait! A Jetway JXBLUE-N78V motherboard gets a good review save for the positioning of a heatsink relative to the PCIe 1x slot, and it's $63 versus the $85 we were looking at before, so now the difference is $112.

So... we could move up to a 9800 GT graphics card, perhaps. The XFG PVT98GYDLU is $130 (ignoring a mail-in rebate) versus the $100 9600 GT we looked at before, but that leaves us $80 to decide what to do with... as it stands we're around $430 rather than $514, with better graphics.

(Reviews say it's a large card, so it might not work in a Micro ATX case. If this were a more serious exercise, we'd confirm the board length and compare with what the case can handle.)

You could go with a Phenom 8750 2.4 GHz triple-core CPU for $120... that eats most of the $80 difference ($60 of it), but the added core and added cache should do nicely--if nothing else, it will let you go do something else while you're on the grid.

Sigh. Too bad I can't justify a new computer after less than a year.

ElvenDEEP

While we're talking about beautiful things and places, I should mention ElvenDEEP. (Many thanks to Susyn Stenvaag for letting me know about it.)

The part of ElvenDEEP that I explored has an eerie glow in the sky, almost pointillist.


Elsewhere a pink tinge seems to be everywhere:



Giant flowers decorate the landscape:


I'll be back to explore further.

a last-minute trip to Winterfaire

I seem to catch things at the last minute. That's how it went with the Garden of NPIRL Delights, and the other day I caught Winterfaire while I still could.

I paid the price of tardiness; in no way could I have seen it all. That said, I saw some wondrous things, like this snowscape with skaters and a striking aurora borealis:


Even places that weren't designed for the event were made even more lovely by the snow. The Second Skin Labs building is beautifully lit without being garish:


So... someday I will visit one of the many gorgeous sites in SL well before its last day. I hope you had the chance to explore Winterfaire thoroughly.

Santa Baby...

Christmas has come and gone, but since I was away from the grid for most of the week including Christmas, and since he was still to be found, it seemed only right to get a head start on 2009. Santa was as jolly as could be expected after so much work, but was not sure he could get me VWR-1258 for next year.

Gwyneth Llewelyn on OpenSim

It would probably save a lot of typing to just characterize Gwyn's Home as must-read, rather than individual entries. :)

Seriously, though, do read "OpenSimulator: the Choice for 2010". It's a comparison of the modular OpenSim design and the options that have been created for it with what we can infer about LL's server code from the glacial slowness with which changes occur and the way fixes to one bug seem to cause others, predicting that by 2010, OpenSim will be serious competition to LL. That discussion is combined with an honest assessment of the current state of OpenSim and the grids running it today.

A while back I quoted Fred Brooks's classic The Mythical Man-Month: "Plan to throw one away. You will anyhow. The only question is whether you will deliver the throwaway to your customers." Perhaps SL is the throwaway and OpenSim the way things will ultimately go. Gwyneth suggests in closing that LL adopt OpenSim and concentrate on adding value to it, and I hope they follow her suggestion.

Amen

A must-read from Fabulously Free in SL.